The two videos below have something in common.
The first is a slickly produced Dutch public service announcement (i.e. propaganda message) designed to undermine the “profiling” of Moroccans among the Dutch public.
The second contains excerpts from this morning’s remarks by President Barack Hussein Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C.
What they have in common is the use of false equivalences when dealing with the issue of Islamic violence. It is a very common practice among our political and media elites to find parallels between Muslim terrorism and Christian behavior, or Jewish behavior, or Hindu behavior. As if, from a nice safe atheist point of view, all religions are roughly the same, so there’s nothing we can really do about religiously inspired violence, except maybe outlaw the practice of all religions. (Which some of them probably want to do.)
The Dutch video, which has been subtitled in English, uses false equivalences such as hair color to induce guilt and self-doubt in its audience about their shameful propensity to notice the overwhelming representation of Moroccans among those who commit criminal acts in the Netherlands. What makes this production even more ghastly is the fact that it uses the indoctrination of very young children — who are barely old enough to talk, never mind understand the bogus moral imperatives that are being thrust upon them — to make its point:
Now we turn to the President of the United States, who led the nation in prayer this morning from the Washington Hilton. His speech also abounds in false equivalences — and much more.
All the examples of religiously-motivated from current affairs violence cited by Mr. Obama involve the behavior of Muslims. No other religion is mentioned as committing violent acts today. When he segues into the (wait for it) Crusades and the Inquisition, there’s no indication that he is reaching eight and five centuries into the past, respectively, to pick out examples of violence committed in the name of Christianity. Nor is there any acknowledgement that the Crusades were defensive wars intended to recover Christian lands that had been forcibly converted to Islam centuries before during violent Muslim invasions.
Next, when Mr. Obama cites slavery and Jim Crow as Christian institutions, he is on even shakier ground. As a cursory study of the history of the mid-19th century will reveal, the most fervent Christians were also the most dedicated Abolitionists. The same was true a hundred years later during the campaign for civil rights for blacks: devout (white) Christians were among the leaders of the movement. Yes, there were occasional arguments that attempted a religious justification for the subordination of blacks, but they were made by (dare I say it?) a tiny minority of Christians.
Let’s take a look at excerpts from what Mr. Obama had to say this morning. Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for annotating and uploading this video:
The last segment of he above video catches President Obama out in what is either a statement of appalling ignorance, or an outright lie. Mr. Obama asserts: “No God condones terror.” Yet there is one god who most emphatically does condone terror. In fact, he requires it of his devotees.
Consider Koran 8:60 (Yusuf Ali translation):
Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power including steeds of war to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies of Allah and your enemies and others besides whom ye may not know but whom Allah doth know. Whatever ye shall spend in the cause of Allah shall be repaid unto you and ye shall not be treated unjustly.
Liar or ignoramus? You decide.
However, if you vote for ignoramus, remember that young Barry Soetoro attended Koran school in Indonesia, where memorizing the Koran (including 8:60) was the number one priority. Maybe little Barry played hooky those days. Or slept through the lessons.
If you watch the full video, you’ll notice several peculiar long pauses in the president’s speech. Despite the obvious presence of the teleprompters in front of him, it’s as if he occasionally forgot his part, and was listening to the transmitters in his molars tell him what to do.
For those who prefer the MSM take on Mr. Obama’s remarks, this AP article is representative.
The White House has posted a helpful transcript of Mr. Obama’s words. Below is the relevant section from which Vlad excerpted (6:42 to 11:49 in the original video; the parts we included are bolded):
But we also see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge — or, worse, sometimes used as a weapon. From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith, their faith, professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact, are betraying it. We see ISIL, a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism — terrorizing religious minorities like the Yezidis, subjecting women to rape as a weapon of war, and claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions.
We see sectarian war in Syria, the murder of Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, religious war in the Central African Republic, a rising tide of anti-Semitism and hate crimes in Europe, so often perpetrated in the name of religion.
So how do we, as people of faith, reconcile these realities — the profound good, the strength, the tenacity, the compassion and love that can flow from all of our faiths, operating alongside those who seek to hijack religious for their own murderous ends?
Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. Michelle and I returned from India — an incredible, beautiful country, full of magnificent diversity — but a place where, in past years, religious faiths of all types have, on occasion, been targeted by other peoples of faith, simply due to their heritage and their beliefs — acts of intolerance that would have shocked Gandhiji, the person who helped to liberate that nation.
So this is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith. In today’s world, when hate groups have their own Twitter accounts and bigotry can fester in hidden places in cyberspace, it can be even harder to counteract such intolerance. But God compels us to try. And in this mission, I believe there are a few principles that can guide us, particularly those of us who profess to believe.
And, first, we should start with some basic humility. I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt — not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth.
Our job is not to ask that God respond to our notion of truth — our job is to be true to Him, His word, and His commandments. And we should assume humbly that we’re confused and don’t always know what we’re doing and we’re staggering and stumbling towards Him, and have some humility in that process. And that means we have to speak up against those who would misuse His name to justify oppression, or violence, or hatred with that fierce certainty. No God condones terror. No grievance justifies the taking of innocent lives, or the oppression of those who are weaker or fewer in number.
The surprise isn’t that he spewed this load of false of equivocations, it was to be expected after his speech in Cairo, he just that kind of gutless politician. The big surprise is the silence from the Conservative politicians and Christian ministers. They should be raking him over the coals.
The institutional cowardice is truly a sight to behold.
He’s not gutless. He’s just not American in identity.
His identity is irrelevant. Gutlessness seems to be part and parcel of the political and religious establishment in this country and crosses party lines as well.
At the very least I would have expect a barrage of criticism by leading Christians and conservatives in this country against Obama’s diatribe.
Instead we are met with silence. That is far more worrisome because it either indicates acceptance or outright cowardice.
Obama is a lost cause. The children in the first video have much to say in their body language. But the worst is the child at the end, who says, tremulously, ” I am what you say I am”…obviously he has just internalized a hugely negative self-presentation.
Those people are willfully, with ignorant malice aforethought, abusing children. Shameful.
Dueteronomy had to be dug into to “justify” slavery by Confederates.
The notable thing about Christianity is the banning of slavery in Christendom. Had to start someplace.
Europe is in much better shape than the US. At least none of them have elected a racial outsider as CinC.
America has lost nerve. Here I’m not talking about the State apparatus, which is still aggressive and militant, but the Nation. It’s done for.
And an unknown outsider at that. I know cocker spaniels with more papers than he has.
Is the inquisition dog whistling to his Jewish backers?
How many people did the inquisition execute? A few hundred? A thousand?
How many Christians have been thrown out of Iraq in the last decade? 500,000 and 40,000 dead.
It’s like lynchings in the U.S. Some 5,000 blacks and whites were lynched, but if you take Solzhenitsyn’s 66 M estimate of Soviet killing, that works out to about 2,000 a day. Thus, the Soviets blew through the lynchings in the U.S. every 2-1/2 days over a period of 70 years on average.
I don’t believe there was a false equivalency in Obama’s speech. If we followed Leviticus, we would stone prostitutes, adulterers, and gay people to death.. I don’t think adultery is right, but stoning people to death for adultery is far worse. The bible lays down many laws that are savage and barbaric. It is secularism, technology, and education that make it so we don’t take the bible in a literal sense. but in the Spanish Inquisition, they DID. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. This resulted in the death of 100,000 women. What Obama was saying was that in a more IGNORANT time for Western civilization, WE acted similar to Muslim extremists do now. It is not a false equivalency.
Don’t forget that “secularism” brought the great moral advances of Lenin and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Castro. The Soviets also had technology and education.
One fundamental point that you and Obama ignore is the huge difference between the ethics of the New Testament (plus the theology built upon it) on the one hand, and those of the Koran and Hadith and sharia on the other. The early Christians made converts in large measure because they were compassionate to the downtrodden, 01and they declared that slave and free were one in Christ, and they railed against the brutality of the games in the Colosseum. They were also emphatically pacifist, and it was only with hesitancy that theologians developed a concept of “just war.”
The contrast with Mohammed and his early followers (or between the first few centuries of each religion) could hardly be more stark. I don’t need to sum up those differences here, but it’s fair to say that the religions are polar opposites at their core in most respects.
It’s true that each has an exclusivist claim that distinguishes it from Buddhism or ancient paganism, and each has a conversion impulse not found in Judaism. And it’s quite true that Christianity was long enforced by state power. But the foundational Christian texts do not support an aggressive campaign to force the whole world to “submit”; far from it. The core Christian teachings, moreover, have done far more to restrain and civilize worldly powers than to make them savage.
As for the Hebrew Bible: Jews have not been stoning adulterers etc. for quite a long time, and the ethics cultivated in Judaism (which fed into Christianity) have been one of the most potent humanitarian forces in the world. That’s why the Jewish state gives medical care to Palestinian Arabs, and why Israelis send disaster relief to Muslim countries. It is extremely rare to see Muslims display compassion for Jews.
In short, the equivalency in Obama’s speech was at best grossly ignorant. All things considered, it’s quite fair to say that the equivalency was false.
Once you’ve finished Deuteronomy, how about looking into the Prophets who “spoke truth to power” and called for justice for the poor and weak?
Which Christians today, anywhere in the World, are seeking a return to the days of Deuteronomy and stoning to be used as a punishment?
Islam has no new covenants that supersede the previous teachings: Christianity does. In fact, the Koran’s last revealed chapter is Sura 9: the most violent of all; calling for the killing of non-Muslims etc. The bible ends with the New Testament.
It’s comments like this that show the need for more education in basic biblical knowledge.
In this sermon, Barry Hussein has shoveled more [equine excreta] than Hercules disposed of in his mucking out of the Augean stables. In debunking it, one hardly knows where to begin. I guess the last paragraph is a good enough place.
“Our job is not to ask that God respond to our notion of truth — our job is to be true to Him, His word, and His commandments.” The latter, of course, is exactly what jihadist killers throughout the centuries have been doing all along.
“No God condones terror.” See the Qur’anic verses 3:151 (“cast terror”), 8:12 (“instill terror”), and 8:60 (“strike terror”), et al.
“No grievance justifies the taking of innocent lives, or the oppression of those who are weaker or fewer in number.” Tell that to the black racists who do that almost daily, Barry Hussein — with your tacit, dog-whistling approval.
I believe non-Muslims cannot be innocents.
The horrifying aspect of Obama is that a majority of American voters elected him not once, but twice.
You can fool all of the people for some of the time…….
Yeah, well…look who he was running against. McCain/Palin in 2008; Romney/Ryan in 2012. Nope; not gonna vote for those tickets, no way in h*ll.
And the comments in this section are tending toward the very “identity politics” that I understand GoV to abhor. ???
Umm, Cynthia, what was wrong with the Romney/Ryan ticket? I ask this an a non-American who thinks Mormonism is almost as silly a religion in theological terms as Scientology. Romney had a triple track record as a successful Governor of Massachusetts, the head of a capital venture firm and the head-honcho of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.
obama is a pathological liar.
Obama. It’s almost impossible to believe. I feel like I am listening to an anti-Christian anti western propagandist. I am.
Obama is one weird dude and unfortunately his sensitive Muslim side has been dominating for some time now. Now I understand. I imagine I am not alone.
It’s the RECIEVERS that were installed in his molars. Mr. Sotoro transmits with that microphone thingy, silly.
Moreover, the whole idea of a “National Prayer Breakfast,” at which the high and mighty gather before the media to exhibit their piety, flies in the face of what Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount:
“And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
“But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.”
(Matthew 6:5-6)
Gee, I wonder why this wasn’t mentioned in Obama’s speech. Perhaps “Reverend” Wright would not approve:
“Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following acceptance of evolutionary theory.”–Stephen Jay Gould
Re. the quotation from Stephen Jay Gould: “Biological arguments for racism…increased by orders of magnitude following acceptance of evolutionary theory”–and were given a good, solid kick in the rear end when the “Out of Africa” evidence started being discovered maybe 35 years ago.
The “latitude determines skin color” science is pretty strong: if a culture lives at a latitude where the strenth of the Sun poses a high risk for skin cancer, the melanin is more fully expressed in the skin (darker skin color). If a culture lives at high latitude (e.g., Denmark, Finland, Russia), the skin needs to let as much Vitamin D pass through to the body as possible; therefore, lighter skin color. (I can look up this study if someone is interested; it was within the past 5 or so years.)
Many scholars and educated people who thought they were *not* racist found out the hidden depth and strength of their racism when the “Out of Africa” thesis was first propounded. Their visceral rejections were incredible to read in Science News, Scientific American, and even (although veiled in academic terminology) in Science. The thought that all of humanity might have begun by looking like the !Kung San Bushmen just about did these “not-racists” in.
First I should mention that in the history of mankind every religion was created to preserve one’s ethnicity. Now that you talk about it, Muslim’s main physical characteristics fade away with every passing day they spend in Europe. Of course this is a very slow process -it took about 400 generations for White people to transform from their African origin. Yet the fact that every passing day one Arab and African cell is dying inside their body replaced with something else is refreshing. They might keep their religion -for how log it has to be seen, but at this latitude their own cells are abandoning them. Nature cannot be cheated.
“According to Al-Taqiyah, Muslims were granted the Shar’iyee right (legitimacy) to infiltrate the Dar el-Harb (war zone), infiltrate the enemy’s cities and forums and plant the seeds of discord and sedition. These agents were acting on behalf of the Muslim authority at war, and therefore were not considered as lying against or denouncing the tenants of Islam.” http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/548123/posts
It would be good to remember that the purveyors of Islam regard it as an obligation to lie to advance the cause. It appears that King Barry the Quisling is applying the principle of Taqiyyeh every time he defends the perpetrators of atrocities committed in the name of Islam.
And so, as people of faith, we are summoned to push back against those who try to distort our religion — I beg your pardon, any religion — for their own nihilistic ends.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/02/05/remarks-president-national-prayer-breakfast
This guy was elected in 2008, at the beginning of the 21st Century. He’s getting paid to deal with what lands on his desk right now.
And remember, he believes in looking forward, not looking backward …
Obama forgot what Odinga done when he ran for president in Indonesia , burning 300 or more in a church while they were alive. Women and children.
No, he’s just sure no one will remember or be reminded. He can count on the MSM to carry his tarnished “Truth”. Their hands are already dirty so what’s a little more in the cause of our president’s advancement as the Light Bringer.
The video about that blond little Dutch boy named Yonas.
His mother is a woman named Anne de Jong working for the UvA (University of Amsterdam) a notorious left wing bulwark. She was one of the participants of the first Gaza flotilla some years back.
On her FB page she said; “It broke my heart, so difficult to talk to my little son this way. Grateful that Yonas and I could make a small contribution to this important project. Yes what you’re about to see is unethical and pedagogical irresponsible but… ”
At the end you see the little boy sliding of his chair and running away. Perhaps crying for being compared with a mass murderer, we don’t know.
Another example of a typical left wing mother who puts her own left wing views above the interests of her own child.
The Dutch propaganda & indoctrination video is particularly sickening for it’s abuse of children. Noticed how they cleverly used the blonde kid as a link to Anders Behring Breivik. it would seem Breivik put the fear of God in them [epithet for progressives]. All over Europe [epithet for progressives] rule their respective countries and they are ofcourse aware that their respective peoples don’t trust them anymore and are turning against them.
Is it me? Please look at Mr. Obama’s hand gesture in the first moments of this clip (around sec 17-21). Near slip up, perhaps?